Israel and Palestine

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the role of civil society in promoting peace in Israel and Palestine.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, this year marks 96 years since Arthur Balfour’s declaration and 20 years since the Oslo peace accord. It took just over 30 years from Balfour’s commitment to give meaning to the establishment of a state for the Jewish people. For the people affected, both Israelis and Palestinians, the past 65 years have not represented peace and security. In that period, three generations of Arab and Jewish people have grown up knowing the sorrow of bereavement, the insecurity of daily life and the uncertainty of their children’s future.

The historical involvement of the United Kingdom and our responsibility for these affairs is not what I want to talk about today, other than to say that people on all sides of this debate will commiserate for lives lost throughout that period. We have witnessed all the scourges of conflict and all the treasure expended for an ultimately simple goal: to share out a relatively small part of the earth to live together in peace.

On the whole, the day-to-day efforts of groups of Israelis and Palestinians to work towards a peaceful resolution on the ground are unrecognised by the international media. These peace activists have not given up on the peace process, even while their Governments either wilfully backslide or are powerless to move forward. They know what peace will look like, and we know that a majority of both of them want peace. For the Palestinians, peace is an end to the occupation so that they can get on with their lives without either Israeli soldiers or Israeli settlers over their shoulder. For Israelis, peace translates into an improved quality of life of security and without fearing the next terrorist incident. Both populations accept that they have to coexist to share a very small portion of land, to grow food, to undertake jobs and to bring up children to lead better lives.

Both populations participate in numerous civil society groups and NGOs to work towards using similar methods: to create a better understanding of each other through familiarity so that stereotypes are broken down; to be constructive in the face of violence; and to work towards limited and concrete goals to promote peace.

Today I want to highlight the work of just two, while paying tribute to the many that there is no time to mention. One such organisation is OneVoice, a youth-led movement working to end occupation and violence in Israel and Palestine. Based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, its campaigns have attracted over 650,000 signatories with over 300,000 Israelis and Palestinians each. They train youth leaders to prepare them for public life, and campaign with a vigour at election times that Western politicians can only watch enviously. OneVoice Israel’s election campaign, Israel 2013, comprised events across the country to highlight the importance of electing politicians who were committed to the two-state solution. I am sure that when the election result is analysed in full we will see some link to their youth work.

OneVoice Palestine is at the forefront of peaceful opposition to illegal settlement activity, given that there are over 600,000 Israeli settlers living in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank—nearly 10% of Israeli Jews in total. I have been in parts of Area C and witnessed how Israel’s annexation policy works in terms of closing off an area of agricultural land, after some time declaring it uncultivated and then expropriating it for settlements. To counter this, in February 2012 OneVoice Palestine brought around 150 Palestinian youths to plant dozens of trees and Palestinian flags in a barren area east of Bethlehem that was under threat of confiscation by Israeli military order.

One of the greatest obstacles to genuine collaboration between the two communities is the difficulty of a common language. Unless both sides speak English, the barrier of Hebrew and Arabic keeps them apart, so these movements tend to be dominated by the better educated elites on both sides. However, they find ways to reach beyond their own socioeconomic class into the wider public. In April last year, OneVoice Palestine youth activists released hundreds of helium balloons along the 1967 line bearing the text in Hebrew of the 2002 Arab peace initiative. In marking the 10th anniversary of the peace initiative in this manner, they ensured that while Israeli media might not mark the event, their actions and the coverage of it made it more widely known.

Operating at another level, defending civil liberties and human rights is the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, ACRI, Israel’s oldest and largest human rights NGO, dealing with the entire spectrum of rights and civil liberties issues in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Since its inception in 1972, ACRI has been consistently successful in bringing precedent-setting litigation up through tribunals all the way to the Supreme Court. Its reputation for integrity and impartiality is widely respected within the legal community and among decision-makers, the media and the public.

ACRI is hands-on, too. Its education department produces material in both Hebrew and Arabic for use by key agents of change, who are teachers in the Jewish and Arab school systems, students, security forces personnel and social and community workers. In other words, building a more tolerant and just society has to be about working from the grass roots up to change attitudes and narratives.

Countering violence through emphasising rights and the rule of law is fundamental to raising awareness of the implications of harming a civilian population in the course of armed combat. In a landmark case that ACRI brought, a military judge has ruled that protesters in, and residents of, the West Bank are permitted to non-violently resist the unlawful orders of soldiers, and should not be viewed as having committed a crime. The importance of using the law in a democratic society to secure rights cannot be overstated. The mere fact of recourse to legal advice and assistance can serve as a hugely important confidence-building measure in divided communities.

I would mention dozens more organisations on both sides of the divide, but in the minutes I have left I will concentrate on some of the obstacles faced by civil society groups in mobilising for peace in such difficult circumstances. The first is the tendency on the part of donors, both on the ground and outside Israel and Palestine, to be deeply risk-averse. Stringent donor requirements result in a tendency on the part of NGOs to work with the converted rather than to work with those on the fringes: the extremists. It is for foreign donors to take the lead on this, and to provide funding that is less reliant on the “tabloid test” of what the headline will say if it transpires that we “backed” a terrorist. If we are to make a difference on the ground, we will have to take risks to support those who may appear extremist but who have sufficient leverage to be change-makers within their communities. Will my noble friend the Minister reflect on that?

A more specific constraint is the legal difficulty of establishing a joint structure when working in two parallel jurisdictions. Most NGOs have to have two separate structures. Travel between the Palestinian territories and Jerusalem is very difficult indeed. I have spoken to scores of OneVoice activists who told me how difficult face-to-face contact was between the two sides. If the idea is to break down barriers through personal contact, then the test of the state’s commitment to peace has to be judged by its ability to facilitate people-to-people contact. What efforts are under way in discussions between the Israeli and Palestinian Governments to allow for these joint organisations to operate as a single legal entity?

Finally, on funding, while the tri-departmental conflict pool between DfID, the FCO and the Ministry of Defence is there to deal with humanitarian emergencies and other protracted conflicts, what amount of FCO and DfID resources are dedicated to ongoing, long-term, grass-roots funding for civil society projects in Israel and the Occupied Territories? What funds are disbursed through the EU mechanisms to these bodies?

I end with the observation that while the peace process is often described as “dead”, in the words of Aaron David Miller, the US negotiator on successive talks:

“It is not yet buried and it will be back”.

When it returns, its foundations will have been laid by the thousands of activists on both sides who work day in and day out for that end. We all owe them a debt of gratitude.